The ruling hands yet another loss to digital rights groups who are waging an ongoing campaign to chip away at the scope of a law that limits citizens’ rights by treating copyright owners’ encryption techniques as sacrosanct.

It’s all part of a long-running showdown between the big copyright holders who view the world as divided into creators and consumers, and a coalition of librarians, digital rights groups, disability activists and hackers who seek to preserve a world where people can repurpose, upgrade and build upon the devices and media they legally buy — just as hackers, painters and culture jammers had done for decades before the DMCA was adopted in 1998.